Skip to content
News Regulation

Midjourney seeks court order forcing Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. to disclose all internal AI use

· by Pondero Newsdesk

The short version

Midjourney filed a new discovery motion arguing the studios cannot cherry-pick only AI documents favoring their copyright case while hiding their own generative AI workflows.

Midjourney seeks court order forcing Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. to disclose all internal AI use

Midjourney filed a new discovery motion on June 30, 2026, asking a federal court to force Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. to disclose every instance of generative AI use inside their organizations, not just the consumer-facing outputs a judge had already ordered them to produce.

What happened

Disney and Universal sued Midjourney in June 2025, alleging its image-generation models reproduce copyrighted characters including Bart Simpson and Darth Vader. Warner Bros. filed a separate suit in September 2025 over Superman, Batman, and related characters. Midjourney has maintained throughout that training on copyrighted images qualifies as fair use.

A judge in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California had previously ruled that the studios must turn over documents about their AI usage, but limited that requirement to cases where AI produced "consumer-facing" videos or images. Per Midjourney's new filing, that limitation lets the studios "cherry-pick only those documents they believe support their market harm claims while depriving Midjourney of documents that would support its defenses."

The filing names storyboarding and internal visual development as examples of studio AI activity that would fall outside the current disclosure order. Midjourney argues that if the studios run image-generating models "for internal use in storyboarding or ideating content for film or TV, that evidence would equally demonstrate that it is an industry custom, even among the studios themselves, to download and train AI on unlicensed copyrighted content." The startup also asked the court to compel the studios to hand over all prompts they submitted to Midjourney, along with the outputs, not only prompts tied to the specific allegedly infringing images.

Why it matters

The motion shifts the discovery battle from a technical copyright question to an evidence-of-industry-practice argument. If the court agrees that studio AI workflows are relevant, Midjourney gains material to argue its training practices are no different in kind from what its accusers do privately. That framing could reshape how fair use gets argued across the full wave of AI copyright litigation, where defendants have so far faced courts focused mainly on whether training constitutes reproduction rather than whether the plaintiffs themselves train on similar data.

The studios' lead attorney David Singer called the motion a "fishing expedition," per Variety. Singer said the studios do not seek to shut down Midjourney, only to stop it from reproducing copyrighted characters without authorization. That framing keeps the legal dispute narrow; Midjourney's motion tries to broaden it. How the judge rules on scope will signal whether defendants in other pending AI copyright cases can pursue similar disclosure strategies.

For AI tool operators watching this case: the outcome has no near-term pricing or access implications for Midjourney. A ruling compelling studio disclosure would, however, create a public record of how large media companies actually use generative AI internally, which could shift the public debate around who bears copyright liability and under what conditions.

What to watch next

The central question is whether the court expands its disclosure order beyond consumer-facing AI output. A ruling in Midjourney's favor would set a discovery precedent that defendants in other AI copyright suits, including cases against Stability AI and other image generators, could cite when seeking similar documents from plaintiffs. The next scheduled hearing date has not been publicly posted, but a ruling on this motion is likely before the end of Q3 2026 given the existing litigation timeline.

Sources